When you see the performance of a hobbled France, you can only dream of what a liberated France would be able to offer!

The editorial of Tuesday 23 October 2012 on atlantico.fr (http://m1p.fr/ozS) ... which is likely to remain relevant for a long time!

• Never have we talked so much about transition and yet never have we suffered so much from inertia. This is the paradox of change: the longer we delay implementing it, trying to preserve the comfort of an obsolete model for as long as possible, the more painful it is to initiate and even difficult to imagine. 
• Our political class is in intellectual deficit. For let us make no mistake, it is not "business" that creates political discredit, but chronic incompetence in proposing a vision and implementing effective solutions. Affairs only serve to reinforce public opinion.
• We are suffering from generalized overtaxation, both for households and for companies, which again, inhibits the desire to undertake, to hire, to invest, to simply believe. 
• We have perhaps the most distant political class, not to say hostile, let's say relatively foreign, to the business world, culturally, and this despite the good intentions sometimes displayed;
• Preferring 'noble' subjects such as history, literature or mathematics, we neglect economics and have a rather pronounced lack of culture in this field (even if I think that the economic common sense of the public is much more important than the 'experts' want to believe). In any case, we must recognise that economic debates are more often dogmatic and partisan than rational and pragmatic;
• Being rational and pragmatic is often considered to be a profound bore, rather inelegant or even vulgar; lyrical flights of fancy and pseudo-great social and economic theories are preferred when it is not simply a populist and demagogic statement that hits the bull's-eye in 10 seconds, the time that has become the standard for debates and media treatment;
• Trade unionism, which elsewhere is apparently constructive, is more often autistic and caricatured in our country, failing to convince the vast majority of the employees it is supposed to "defend";
• The employers often give him the runaround, even if the dynamic of listening and consultation is undoubtedly positive;
• Our companies are not loved (brands yes, small ones yes, the local entrepreneur yes, but when it comes to large companies, especially powerful and international ones, then the "entrepreneur" becomes the "boss"; the class struggle is still as strong in France;

We envy the success that we are happy to see fail;

• Since our Judeo-Christian upbringing, we have maintained a certain distance from money, which is dirty even when it is honestly earned (is this possible? because the rich are either awful, lazy rentiers, or dirty "idiots" as a certain press would say, or "new" and therefore uneducated);
• We have an omnipresent state that is becoming omnipotent, and which, in denial of reality, still dreams of the welfare state like a nostalgic old star looking back on his past successes;

We are the most pessimistic population on the planet, irritated by the world that manages to live without us;

• We are the world champions of analysis, audits, findings, commissions, "parliamentary reports", debates and diagnoses ... when others are content to decide and move forward; finally we always claim to know exactly what to do, without ever doing it.
• We prefer to search than to find, and when we do find and invent, we leave it to others to market our brilliant finds (nobility of research vs. vulgarity of marketing);
• We are still more and more seduced by the Enlightenment idea of being generalists and present everywhere, in all fields, rather than specialists.

... and yet ...

• We are - still - the 5th largest economy in the world;
• The whole world envies our researchers, engineers and scientists;
• Paris is the 4th most attractive city in the world (source PwC); we are also the world's leading tourist destination;
• Of course, we suffer from a trade deficit, but certain sectors such as luxury goods, aeronautics, gastronomy and certain high technologies are not only exporters but leaders;
• We do not have enough large SMEs but we have an exceptional armada of large global groups;
• Young people suffer from loneliness and an increasingly gloomy economic situation, but they still believe in politics and in their ability to remake the world;
• Entrepreneurs are mistreated, but the French still create new companies, around 550,000 per year (but it's going down);
• We are grumpy, have a changing tax system and an uncompetitive labour cost, but we remain a land of foreign investment (for a long time the leading European destination);
• Our health care system is too expensive and needs to be reformed, but it treats everyone, and is still considered the best in the world, to the point of generating medical tourism;
• "Our young start-ups are so successful in digital technology and creation that France is the star country at the CES in Las Vegas and is attracting foreign funds;

We have, more or less unknowingly, an extremely creative mind (some explain this more by our critical and revolutionary fibre than by our educational system);

• We have an "art de vivre" and a "French touch" that is unique in the world;
• Sectors and companies are recruiting, innovating and offering prospects, but we know little about these promising sectors, due to a lack of media exposure because, as we know, "a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows"... so we don't talk about the forest that grows...;

Of course, the situation is difficult, alarming, socially dramatic for many, but this France that is so heavily hindered, that has difficulty in making its own cultural revolution to adapt to and "take advantage" of this new world, is obviously still there. And yet, France is driving with the handbrake on!

This hobbled France is especially beneficial to our competitors. But when we see what it is capable of offering on the track with its chains on its feet and its dogmatic and regulatory straitjacket, we dream of what it would be capable of giving free of its chains and shackles! 

If the load increases further, the race will slow down, inevitably, we will come to a standstill, suffocated and exhausted, we will end up like Tuttle (Robert de Niro) in Brazil, disappearing under the paperwork!

It is not the right or the left that must "decompress", it is the whole of France, freed from its own constraints, censures and taboos.

A France that would no longer be a France with leaden soles but as Verlaine called Rimbaud, a France with windy soles, conquering and irresistible.

Alain Renaudin